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Originally Posted by [hobo]eclipse
Can someone explain what is different between the hardware that makes Apple Apple? and windows not compatible with it till now, and the MAC OSs not available on a PC. Like the difference between a PC and a MAC?? really im pretty clueless in that area an wanderin.
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It used to be completely different, both the hardware and the software. Macs had CPUs with different instruction sets, the hardware inside used different interfaces etc. Then PC adopted some of the Mac technologies and vice-versa, so the CPU remained the only truly different piece of hardware. Finally, Macs adopted x86 (PC) CPUs. So it's down to OS and other software (except for high-end Macs, which still have IBM G5 CPUs).
What makes new Macs incompatible with Windows is EFI, which can be thought of as an advanced type of BIOS - apparently, that thing is not 100% compatible with WinXP, and it is incompatible with older Windowses.
And the only thing that prevents Mac OS X from running on a normal PC is some artificial protection - probably a device ID it reads from the mobo or some other part (like the protection that prevents ATi FireGL drivers from being installed on regular Radeons even if the hardware is more or less the same).
So, apart from some marginal and artificial differences, the difference between a Mac and a PC is the same as the difference between two PCs, out of which one is running Windows and the other Linux.